28.5: Acquiring Cognitive Skills

The most important step toward better reasoning is learning to spontaneously recognize situations where a cognitive tool or skill should be applied. Simply learning to fill in a blank saying whether one sentence is a necessary or a sufficient condition for a second won’t be of much help when you need to think about necessary and sufficient conditions in the real world. Situations (outside textbooks) do not come marked with labels saying that they involve necessary or sufficient conditions, so you need to be able to recognize them on your own. Similar points hold for most of the other concepts and tools we have learned about, including the very general strategies of considering alternatives or asking whether there is invisible data.

We encountered this general issue early in the book when we discussed inert knowledge (8.7). Psychologists and educators also speak of transfer of learning – being able to transfer the concepts and principles you learn in one setting (like the classroom) to use them in other settings (on the job, or in dealing with your family).

How can we teach and learn how to apply cognitive tools in life outside the classroom? These are empirical questions, and we are still discovering the answers. Experienced teachers know a good deal about such things, but they are not immune to the biases and mistakes discussed in earlier chapters. Fortunately, in addition to first-hand experience, there has now been a good deal of research on the transfer of cognitive skills, and much of it points to two conclusions:

• Teaching reasoning tools and skills requires teaching for transfer.
• Learning reasoning tools and skills requires learning for transfer.

Teaching for Transfer

How do we teach for transfer? First, it is important that students understand why principles and rules work the way they do, rather than merely learning to apply them to simple examples by rote. Second, students need a lot of practice applying the concepts and principles for critical reasoning in a wide range of situations, to a wide range of subject matters. If you want to be able to apply a skill (like noticing the relevance of base rates) in a wide range of circumstances, you need to practice it is a wide range of circumstances. If you want to be able to apply a skill (like spotting skewed anchors) in new and novel situations (like a new job), you need to practice it in new and novel situations.

It is especially important for students to apply the skills they are acquiring in situations that matter in their own lives. But it is unlikely that they will immediately see the relevance of some principles (e.g., regression to the mean) to such situations (e.g., ones involving choices of a major or job) without help. It is also probably easier to gain a lasting mastery of cognitive tools if the course work (e.g., chapters exercises, exams) is cumulative. It is obvious that most of the exercises at the end of a section on necessary and sufficient conditions involve these concepts, and so the student is primed to use them. But real-life situations rarely come labeled to prime us in this way.

It also appears that a variety of instructional tools are useful: lectures, individual projects, group discussion, group projects, computer projects, assembling a few randomly selected problems from earlier chapters every so often, and graded portfolios of actual situations the student encounters that involve the things learned in class.

Habits

Much of what we do, we do out of habit—almost automatically, without giving it much thought. Good reasoning typically results from good cognitive habits (e.g., a habit of looking for relevant evidence before drawing a conclusion). Bad reasoning often results from bad ones (e.g., a habit of jumping to conclusions without considering the evidence).

This means that changing how we reason often requires changing habits, many of which are deeply ingrained, and learning for transfer requires enough practice that new and better habits can begin to take root. At first this requires conscious effort, but with further practice at least some reasoning skills can become more automatic, and second nature. This takes effort, and it requires real motivation to sustain it when there are more appealing things to do.

Although there is a good deal of research to support these points, the basic point is also a matter of common sense. No one supposes that you can learn to become a good cook just by reading cookbooks, without setting foot in the kitchen, or that you could learn to play the guitar merely by reading manuals. These are skills, and like all skills they can only be learned by practice. Lots of it. Critical reasoning is no different in this regard, but since it affects all aspects of our lives, it is more important.